Resources

Bitcoin is a new and exciting opportunity, but it’s totally different than the money you are used to many people jump into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies without a solid understanding of the tech or what it represents. Don’t invest a significant amount of money into crypto without doing your own research. *this collection of links is adapted from Lopp.net’s list.

Altcoins Aren’t Bitcoin

Many new people to cryptocurrency see the high price of bitcoin and relatively low price of altcoins and think about buying altcoins instead of bitcoin. There is one bitcoin, with 21 million coins, don’t be fooled into buying an alternative coin that has none of the world changing aspects of bitcoin. This is a list of some altcoin discussions I’ve found that will help you understand the inferiority of altcoins.

Bitcoin’s Future

Lightning Network

Lightning is the next generation bitcoin transaction layer. Bitcoin is a great store of value with payments possible. However, transactions on the base layer are encumbered by many necessary factors in bitcoin’s design. Lightning brings instant scale to transactions.

TumbleBit

“TumbleBit is a new anonymous payments protocol that is fully compatible with today’s Bitcoin protocol. TumbleBit allows parties to make payments through an untrusted Tumbler. No-one, not even the Tumbler, can tell which payer paid which payee.”

Run a Full Node

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer (p2p) network. It’s supported and ruled by those peers/users. To support the decentralization and the proper functioning of incentives consider running a full node. It’s not the same as mining, and can be done relatively cheaply, about $3/mo.